Monday, August 15, 2011

Technology at Work:

How are we using technology in our libraries?

Date: Wednesday, September 14, 2011Where: The Rutgers ClubTime: Networking will begin at 5:30 pm, buffet dinner at 6 p.m., followed by speakers

Speakers/Topics:

Karen McQuillen

Library & Information Services Manager, Educational Testing Service, will speak about how the Brigham Library at Educational Testing Service uses SharePoint to disseminate information and collaborate with colleagues.

﻿Patricia Dawson

Science Librarian, Rider University, will discuss how Moore Library at Rider University uses Google Docs and the READ Scale for tracking transactions at the reference desk.

Mei Ling Lo

Math/Computer Science Librarian, Rutgers University Libraries, will discuss QR Codes and their use at Rutgers Library of Science and Medicine.

Cynthia Sullivan has more than 25 years of experience managing libraries
in a global financial services organization, including remote and
offshore library organizations. Her expertise has been focused on the
strategic use of technology to deliver library and knowledge services.
Most recently, Cindy has developed workshops that offer management
toolkits for librarians and knowledge services directors. You can read
more about Cindy at her website http://www.csullivanstrategicinformation.com/

Cost: $30 for SLA members (any chapter); $20 "Between jobs" members and students; $35 for non-members. Pay via credit card or bank account using PayPal, or mail us a check.You do not need a PayPal account to pay online!

You can now register and pay for the meeting either by (1) mailing the registration form and check or (2) by PayPal/credit card via our Evite invitation. Use Evite to pay via PayPal or credit card by clicking on the link below: http://www.evite.com/app/publicUrl/VQPIZQOGPGEHPRVMBMHP/PT-SLAmeeting1-20-2010. (Clicking on the member, non-member, or student/retiree links will take you to the PayPal site. The links work with Internet Explorer but not Mozilla.)

Library budgets are facing drastic cuts, given the current economic crisis. Unfortunately, the fee-based abstracting and indexing services are now in the spotlight and, in many cases, on the chopping block. These A&I services were considered sacred and essential in the seventies, and the birth of online searching only strengthened their position. However, in the intervening forty years a new paradigm has evolved. Open access and free search services such as Google Scholar, Scitopia, Scirus, and CiteSeer are now making librarians question the need for fee-based services. This presentation will examine the changing landscape for secondary A&I services and explore the possibility that these services may indeed follow the downward spiral that newspapers are on today.

Saturday, October 31, 2009

SLA
members are viewed as leaders and innovators in the information
professional field, but how we present ourselves may influence our
employers and clients more than we think, Anne Caputo, SLA
President-Elect, recently told New Jersey members.

Caputo was
the featured speaker at two SLA meetings on Oct. 7, one for students at
Rutgers, and later at the annual joint meeting of the New Jersey
and Princeton-Trenton Chapters at IEEE in Piscataway.

Caputo spoke about the profession in general, and more specifically about SLA's Alignment Project. The Alignment Project is meant to
help members demonstrate their value to their clients and
organizations.

She
spoke on the eve of the SLA Board of Directors' decision to ask members
to change the name of the 100-year-old organization to the Association
for Strategic Knowledge Professionals. (Members will get their say when
they vote online, starting Nov. 16 and ending Dec. 9.)

The
name Special Libraries Association has been a handicap because "hardly
anyone except us knows what it means ... most of us are not librarians
... and what the heck does special mean?" Caputo said. The
association's founders chose the name as a placeholder and would be
astonished that it's still being used a century later, she said.

SLA
members have about 2,000 different job titles, and many of them do not
include the word "library." It's important to recognize that "we have a
unique set of knowledge and capabilities that no one else has. ... We
should be the czars and czarinas, kings and queens of the information
world," Caputo said.

Information professionals should not
undervalue themselves and their flexibility, Caputo said. She gave two
career examples: a recent job listing and the beginning of her career
in 1976.

A recent Monster.com posting for eBay/PayPal appeared
under the job title "Research" and used that word three times in the
posting, though not "library" or "librarian." The job, though not
entry-level, calls upon many skills that librarians and information
professionals possess, and pays $115K.

Speaking of "Ks" (as in
thousands), Caputo noted that she didn't know what the term meant when
she graduated from San Jose State University with a library science
degree. She began her info pro career in 1976 at Lockheed Martin in
California, as a customer service trainer for the Dialog database. The
fact that she was "articulate, frank and honest" helped her land the
job amid a recession in California. (The other qualifications that
impressed her employer: She was a woman who had been a teacher and, in
high school, the Oregon state debate champion.) Her starting pay was
$10K, and she's had only two employers since then, Dialog and Dow Jones
(though both have gone through ownership changes).

Caputo is Dow Jones' Executive Director of Learning & Information Professional Programs,
which is a marketing role. She's never worked in a library, though her
librarian skills and SLA connections continually help her.

"For
the rest of your professional life, you'll never find better friends or
mentors (outside SLA)," Caputo told students. "People in competing
companies will help each other. It has given me the smartest mentors
I've ever known."

Other associations for information
professionals (such as in law and medicine) that use the term "library"
in their name "may be watching us (SLA)" in order to determine whether
changing their name will broaden their appeal. "We are losing jobs and
we are losing libraries. We need to attract more people like us."

Caputo called SLA's Alignment Project a $1 million investment and noted
that it was funded several years ago using part of the proceeds from
the sale of the the association's headquarters in Washington, D.C. (The
association moved to a more modern building in Virginia.) The money
funded external validation of the association's research.

Part of that research was "dial testing" where executives record their
sentiment (positive or negative) throughout a speech or presentation by
turning the dial up or down. Caputo and several other SLA
representatives scored much higher than an actress when they all spoke
the same script about the information profession. The actress received
the lowest scores when talking about info pro topics because she lacked
passion. "You can be the most passionate deliverers of the message
because you believe it," Caputo said.

In Caputo's presentation below, some of the images on the SlideShare presentation include light scratch marks that did
not display on the original file. For an alternative download please go
to http://bit.ly/2OQfpQ.

Friday, October 23, 2009

New Jersey/New York members have three chances to discuss the proposed
SLA Name Change as they prepare to vote Nov. 16 through Dec. 9, including
one call-in option for those outside the area. Please take advantage of these
opportunities so you can make an informed decision. All three events are listed
on the
New Jersey Chapter Calendar. The calendar entries include the addresses and
directions/transit information.

Wednesday, Nov. 11, 2009: In person in Somerville, N.J., and by
teleconference. The event is free, whether in person or by phone, but you
must register online:
http://bit.ly/2c1T1A. If you have trouble registering, please contact us
at newjersey.sla@gmail.com
(Eric Schwarz). (Note: This event conflicts with the Rutgers MLIS Colloquium
in New Brunswick.) Presented by the New Jersey Chapter.

6:30 p.m.: Greetings and light refreshments in Somerville.

7 p.m.: Teleconference.

8 p.m.: In-person discussion continues in Somerville.

Thursday, Nov. 12, 2009. In person in New York City. RSVP to
cohen.v@att.net (Vida Cohen). Free.
Presented by the New York Chapter.

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

From: Eric Schwarz, President of NJSLA (New Jersey Chapter of the Special Libraries Association)

October 19, 2009

A big thank you to IEEE for making our Oct. 7 meeting with SLA President-Elect Anne Caputo a success. IEEE let us use its Operations Center for a joint meeting of the Princeton-Trenton and New Jersey Chapters, and also is donating $400, which helped make the event affordable. At the meeting, Anne spoke about "Creating the Future -- SLA at 100: Changing and Realigning." The event was held the night before the SLA Board of Directors approved sending to members a vote to change our organization's name to the Association of Strategic Knowledge Professionals. (For more information on the name change, please see http://tinyurl.com/slanamechange.)

SLA Chapter Cabinet Chair-Elect Ruth Wolfish started planning in January to make this joint meeting happen with Anne, and at IEEE. She was also instrumental in framing the conversation once it became clear that SLA's Alignment Project and proposed name change would be the topic of the day. Anne and Ruth were eager to talk to Rutgers students at an earlier event in New Brunswick -- about SLA and the information profession in general. At the Rutgers meeting, Ruth asked the students about their own careers and questions, lending additional energy to an exciting talk. At the evening meeting at IEEE, Ruth introduced Anne and the discussion in a friendly and informative fashion, and even gave out IEEE gifts to participants who submitted questions to Anne.

Generating from the Rutgers discussion, Ruth quizzed Dean Jorge Reina Schement about the university's recent rebranding of the "library school" to the School of Communication and Information. She shared her correspondence with Dean Schement to help inform SLA members as we decide on our own rebranding. (See http://tinyurl.com/yfstm8y.)

Ruth and her colleagues at IEEE who coordinated the event (Pat Corcoran, Elisabeth Moscara and Kristen Fitzpatrick) did so with great expertise in planning the meeting, and also knowledge and passion in serving our members' needs, before, during and after the event.

For that, I'm sure I speak for the 50 attendees, and the Boards of the Princeton-Trenton and New Jersey Chapters, in again saying thank you very much!

As the amount of available data continues to grow at an
exponential rate, tools are being developed to help users explore and gain
insights into this rich data universe in interactive and visual ways.

Dr. Spoerri’s talk will provide an overview of key design
approaches and tools for visualizing a diverse set of data domains. It will
also show examples from the current work being done at Rutgers and address how
libraries can benefit from information visualization.

Thursday, September 10, 2009

Joint Annual Meeting of New Jersey and Princeton-Trenton SLA Chapters.All SLA members, students and friends are invited to attend!

SLA at 100: Changing and Realigning

* Network with other professionals in NYC, PA, and other parts of NJ * Enjoy a very nice dinner for a reasonable price * Get answers to your questions about the proposed changes to SLA * Ask about the SLA name change

* NETWORK - meet at least 2 members of the SLA Board of Directors, at least 3 SLA Chapter Presidents, members from NJ, NYC, and PA * DINNER - Salad, dinner and dessert for $25 for SLA members * ANSWERS - ask the hard questions to Anne Caputo, SLA President Elect * ALIGNMENT - what is it, why is SLA doing this, what is it about? * NAME - what are the choices, will there be a vote, will the vote be by paper or electronic, when will this occur ?

Get the answers to the tough questions from Anne Caputo, who will be SLA president in 2010!

REGISTER or see the complete flier with more details at:http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=R0G2ugBuuNzWo_2fUQAbruCw_3d_3d.

Tuesday, September 01, 2009

Wisdom from the Experts or what $50,000 worth of professional
development taught me

Connie Paul, Executive Director
of the Central Jersey Regional Library Cooperative,shares the one lesson she learned from the
best business and professional leaders she has heard in the past few years.

Venue:Princeton
Public Library, 65 Witherspoon St.Princeton, NJ08542(Parking is available
in the Spring Street municipal lot located adjacent to the library. Drivers can enter the lot from Spring Street or
through the library access driveway off Wiggins Street.)

Dinner starts: 5:30

Presentation: 5:45 – 6:45**

Networking at 6:45**

**Note: the presentation will be end early to accommodate those interested
in attending

Phillipa Gregory
(author of The Other Boleyn Girl)
lecture at the Nassau Presbyterian Church 61 Nassau St, Princeton, NJ 08542 @
7pm.Tickets are $10 in advance for
priority seating, no ticket price for regular seating. Tickets go on sale on PPL website on August 18.

Return this form with your check (payable to P-T SLA)
no later than September 11 to:

Saturday, August 01, 2009

Annual Joint Meeting of the New Jersey and Princeton-Trenton Chapters of SLA

SLA at 100: Changing and Realigning

Featuring a discussion led by Anne Caputo, 2010 SLA President

Sponsored by IEEE

Wednesday, October 7, 5:30 – 9 p.m.

IEEE Operations Center445 Hoes Lane

Piscataway, NJ 08854-4141

Directions: http://www.ieee.org/web/aboutus/directions.html

(Park in front or back of building.)

Each attendee will have to bring US ID such as a license or passport. You will have your picture taken upon entry. No one will be admitted after 6:15, because Security leaves at 6:30.

In SLA’s Centennial Year, you may be hearing a lot about Realignment; changing the name of the association; and bringing other professionals into our fold. Are “Libraries” and “Librarians” still a relevant “product,” but in need of new marketing? Anne will help bring clarity to the Association’s goals and process as SLA members get ready to make important decisions about the future of the profession.

More information on the Alignment Project is online. You can watch a video on Alignment with Anne and current SLA President Gloria Zamora.

Anne Caputo is Executive Director of Dow Jones' Learning & Information Professional Programs where she is responsible for the planning and development of learning initiatives for Dow Jones Content Technology Solutions group. She is also responsible for strategic planning, marketing and the creation of alliances with and for information professionals. Prior to joining Dow Jones in 1998, she served in various positions with The Dialog Corporation, most recently as Director of Dialog's Quantum information professional program and the Classroom Instruction Program.

Additionally, Anne is an adjunct faculty member at the University of Maryland, College of Library and Information Services, where she teaches Access to Information in Electronic Environments. She is also a member of the distance education faculty for the University of Tennessee, School of Information Sciences.

Anne has served SLA at the local level as a Director and later President of the Washington, DC Chapter. She has also served at the international level on SLA's Board of Directors as the 2006-2007 Chapter Cabinet Chair and as Secretary to the Board. She is currently the Ethics Ambassador for the Washington, DC Chapter. In 2004 she was named a recipient of SLA's Rose L. Vormelker Award for mentoring students and practicing professionals and was named a Fellow of SLA at the 2008 Annual Conference.

A social hour will begin at 5:30. Buffet style dinner will be available at 6:30 with Anne’s presentation to follow. (We will have some vegetarian options, but because this is a buffet, we cannot accommodate individual dietary requests.)